Multistrike: Grants a chance for spells and abilities to fire an additional time, at 30% effectiveness (both damage and healing).

Readiness: Reduces the cooldown of several class abilities with long-cooldowns.

Hit and Expertise on all items have been replaced with a universally useful secondary stat.

Stats that are not useful to your current class specialization will be grayed out in the tooltip rather than green, and will not be counted on your character stat sheet.

Spirit for non-healing specializations

Bonus Armor for non-tanking specializations

Strength for Agility/Intellect-users

Agility for Strength/Intellect-users

Intellect for Strength/Agility-users

For example, Agility on a cloak will be greyed out for all Warrior specializations and they will not receive an increase to Agility if equipped. However, if the same cloak is equipped by a Hunter, Agility will show up as green and they’ll receive the increase to their Agility.

Warlords of Draenor Items

Mail and Leather Armor pieces will always have Agility and Intellect on it.

Serpent Spread has been renamed Serpent Sting, and remains a passive for Survival Hunters. It causes Multi-Shot and Arcane Shot to also apply the Serpent Sting poison, which does instant and periodic damage.

Movement Speed
"Previously, multiple movement speed modifiers on you were multiplicative, meaning that if you had two different +25% movement speed bonuses, they resulted in a total movement speed of 56% (1.25*1.25 = 1.56)."

"Movement speed bonuses have been changed to be additive. The previous example with two different +25% movement speed bonuses would result in a total movement speed of +50%. The logic governing which bonuses stack with others has been simplified as well."

If a bonus is self-only and passive, it now stacks additively with everything.

Aspect of the Cheetah (Inferred)

If a bonus is temporary or applies to other players, it's considered exclusive, and the character only gains the benefit of the highest exclusive bonus.

Overall Class Changes
"Hunters have lacked a strong distinction between the different specializations. What we mean by that is that the Hunter specializations all had rotations that felt similar, with Marksmanship and Survival having the most blurred identities (Beast Mastery felt well rooted in the pet). Hunters were also some of the most afflicted by button bloat. To address these problems, we opted to make changes to each specialization's rotation, primarily through removing abilities, and making some of them unique to each spec. This means things like Aimed Shot being the primary Focus dump for Marksmanship, instead of Arcane Shot or Serpent Sting being available only to Survival. Hunters also had a large number of cooldown abilities, which we've also cut down (some of which we moved to the talent tree, competing with other active buttons). For a full list of what was removed, please see Ability Pruning and PvP - Crowd Control and Diminishing Returns."

"One of the most difficult abilities to decide to cut was Aspect of the Hawk. It began to feel fairly meaningless, since it was used virtually all of the time in combat, so might as well have just been passive. We decided to cut Aspect of the Hawk, and bake in its benefit to the other abilities. The remaining aspect abilities are all utility only, and are being moved off the stance bar and made toggles."

"Overall, Hunters should see a drastic reduction in the number of active buttons, and have a clearer distinction between the different specializations. With some of these changes, you may find yourself favoring a different specialization. Keep in mind that Draenor Perks, earned from levels 91 to 99, will serve to further distinguish the different specializations."

Aspect of the Pack no longer appears on the stance bar and is now on the global cooldown.

Aspect of the Cheetah no longer appears on the stance bar and is now on the global cooldown.

Glyph of Aspect of the Beast: The ability taught by this Glyph no longer appears on the stance bar and is now on the global cooldown.

Glyph of Aspect of the Cheetah: No longer triggers any cooldown on Aspects.

"We did a comprehensive pass on Hunter pet abilities. As mentioned above in Crowd Control and Diminishing Returns, all full crowd-control abilities have been removed from Hunter pets and replaced those with new abilities, including spreading some that were previously restricted to exotic pets. Additionally, Hunters can now tame beasts from new pet families."

Hunters may now tame beasts from 3 new pet families.

Hydra

Riverbeast

Hook Wasp (Exotic)

Abilities unique to each hunter pet family have been revised to provide a standard buff, debuff, or ability.

"There were also a few other changes, primarily for quality of life and rotational consistency."

Aimed Shot now deals 20% more damage and can be cast while moving.

Dismiss Pet now ignores line of sight.

Hunter Pets now have a 1 second global cooldown.

Growl now has a 30-yard range.

Black Arrow’s periodic effect now has a chance each time it deals damage to cause the next 2 Explosive Shots to cost no Focus and not trigger a cooldown. This effect is guaranteed to activate at least once.

Explosive Trap now places a periodic-damage effect on each target within the radius of the explosion, rather than a persistent effect on the ground.

Several raid buffs provided by pets have been changed into auras that are automatically applied to the Hunter's party or raid.

Last edited by Zetharl on Sat Apr 19, 2014 12:36 am, edited 39 times in total.

Pet wise, I'm at a loss to see where it will end up. With so many family abilities removed, (no not just the CC ones) I'm left wondering if pet families will have any meaning to them... I mean, it's looking like there will be no point in having a Carrion Bird Family, or Bear, etc. and that they'll just all be one big "PET" group?

Ah I was just considering making this thread.
I don't know if I like the change to professions as it sounds like its really going to flood an already saturated market on my home server. As far as hunter notes go its all sweet and sour for me. Some of it sounds reasonable and other things I'm not so sure of. Some of this stuff sounds really restricting.

AdamSavage wrote:But I liked Silencing Shot.... How do you stop a cast now, without it ?

Interrupting shot.

I really hope they come up with new pet abilities instead of just giving them all +crit or other pre-existing stuff. There's only so many options though. I doubt there's that many different 'utility' type abilities they can add in, especially since they've trimmed abilities across the board classwise.
It does seem a little off that the warlock succubus/shivarah keeps their CC. Sure, it will have a CD of 30 seconds, but that's lower than many of the current hunter pet CC CDs. On my healing priest in arenas, it was shivarah and ghoul that mess me up the most, less so with hunter pets.

Last edited by Xota on Thu Apr 03, 2014 10:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.

yikes ok, I just got to read the spell pruning and i'm less happy now. Why in the world do you need to remove cower? I will miss hunters mark but I'm really not liking the idea of distracting shot being removed. That thing saved my hide a lot and was an important spell for pve groups.
Sad to see some of these pet abilities go. I expected the stuns to get booted but I thought we could at least keep the roots.
And serpent sting? really? >.< I may have to say goodbye to BM and go hard core surv for the first time in years.

Trying to remind myself this is very early and I should not flip any tables before I see the full picture. Blizzard made a mistake in my opinion sharing THIS much information. We needed some new information, sure, but when you share this much at once, players are going to get scared. I try to keep a level head about changes and wait until I see the full picture, but what I've read has made me all sorts of nervous. Some changes need to be eased into, or give us a glimpse into more of the bigger picture to help us not go into full panic. The removal of so many pet abilities is just one example. I think this is gonna make players flip out.

First impressions tho...

Cower has been removed as a pet ability.
This was on the pet bar, not our bar. How was it adding to bloat? It could could auto cast too. Were that many hunters macroing it? This is the only defensive ability most pets have.

Distracting Shot has been removed.
Don't like this one bit.

Lock and Load has been removed.
-yet-Black Arrow now naturally has a chance to cause the Lock and Load effect.

1- I thought Black Arrow naturally had the chance to proc LnL now?
2- How can one proc what has been removed?

Stampede is now a level-75 talent, replacing Lynx Rush.
I hope they change Stampede then to make it more worthy of a talent. :\

Revive Pet and Mend Pet now share one button, which toggles based on whether you have a live pet.
Win!

Last edited by Quiv on Thu Apr 03, 2014 10:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.

It's tough to say where this will leave us hunters. So many things to those patch notes that just aren't good. Man o man. Echoing what so many others have said in I am not sure how I feel about this but it doesn't sound like these changes are truly for the good. To me, and this is only speaking for myself, it feels like they're trying to really dumb down the class.

zedxrgal wrote:It's tough to say where this will leave us hunters. So many things to those patch notes that just aren't good. Man o man. Echoing what so many others have said in I am not sure how I feel about this but it doesn't sound like these changes are truly for the good. To me, and this is only speaking for myself, it feels like they're trying to really dumb down the class.

I totally agree, especially on the "dumbing down the class" bit. I've never felt like we had all that much bloat, and removing so many things, especially things that have been part of our class for a long time, makes it feel like we really ARE becoming the "easy class" people have said we are since Vanilla.

Priests are getting crapped on pretty hard, too, and mages and paladins are now giving me a headache trying to figure out what I'll be doing, with warlocks just summoning a huge "????" in my brain. It sorta feels like they're trying to make EVERYTHING easier, with hunters taking the brunt of the damage.

I hated having to keep Inquisition up, honestly. One more thing to finagle when I'm more worried about not standing in shit and trying to do damage while not dying. It was fussy and unnecessary and I didn't like it when it was added and I'm not a bit sad to see it go.

The pet family thing is concerning, but since they aren't removing all pet abilities (the buff stuff is sticking around) I suspect they're likely to just redistribute buffs to the CC families. So there'll be more than two that have, say, +crit, and what's more there's some abilities like Multistrike that have no representation in the current pet selection (Hydras should TOTES give +multistrike).

There's a silver lining to the removal of pet-cc though. Basilisks (and to a slightly lesser extent, dogs, cranes, etc.) will now become more viable pets in dungeons. I love basilisks to bits and was all excited to get them...until they ended up with a flatly useless family special. (there might be SOME rare instance where 'invulnerablizing' a mob is useful but I can't think of any).

And while spiders make great tanks (and annoying bastards in PVP, which is undoubtedly the reason for the change)... I have more than once been yelled at by tanks in dungeons to turn off web because it messes up their pulls. Pet CC is fairly handy in leveling, but most of its utility is in PVP and it's PVP that they're nerfing all CC for. If you're unhappy with the cc changes... blame the pvpers.

I just had a thought. Removing some of these things should reduce processing power requirements therefore mitigating the increased power needed by the new character models. I wonder if this and their desire to keep the game playable for a wide range of PC's figured into things. The item squish may have some of the same effect. Maybe they were afraid of blocking too many people from playing the game? You get a game that looks better but has the same, or maybe even better, playability.

I really don't like the removal of Serpent Sting and Hunter's Mark. BM will be the only spec without a DOT?